November 13, 2011 | 4:00 p.m.

How Would It Look If God Was in Charge?

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 65:17–25

A few days ago I was reminded of a book I haven’t thought about since I read it as a child—Charlotte’s Web, the story about a little girl named Fern who lives on a farm and befriends a tiny newborn pig, whom she names Wilbur. If you have not read it or, like me, have not thought about it in a long time, it’s a story for adults as much as for children, full of reminders to all of us about the important things in life we often overlook or fail to appreciate. One clever twist in the story comes when Fern’s parents discover that she not only loves Wilbur the pig, but that she spends what seems like an unusual amount of time out in the barnyard talking to all of the animals as if they were human beings. Fern’s mother, unable to break her daughter of this habit that they fear is strange and dangerous, discusses it with the family doctor, who in a wise reply, says to her mother, “Your daughter is inflicted with a condition which is incurable, but it’s a condition which, unfortunately, will not last forever . . . it’s called childhood.”

Obviously this is a story about the value of imagination. Imagination gives us the ability to see the potential in things, to observe things as they are and ask what they might become. When we are children, imagination is what allows bicycles to become airplanes and kitchen tools to become musical instruments. Imagination allows a blanket to become the canopy of a tree house or the roof of a secret bunker. Imagination is something I’ve talked about in this service before. Imagination has tremendous value for faith, not because what we Christians believe is untrue, but because imagination is what gives us the potential to see more than what meets the eye. Without imagination, it is difficult to conceptualize anything other than what we already have in front of us, and that presents a serious problem for people of faith: you see, without imagination, there is no hope.

In the Bible, the prophets are the ones who teach us the most about imagination. In our ongoing exploration of major ideas in the Old Testament, this afternoon we arrive at the topic of prophecy. Prophets often seem like strange characters to us, crying out against the people and the government, sometimes speaking words of doom we’d prefer not to hear, constantly engaging in bizarre actions in order to draw attention to themselves. The prophet Ezekiel, in order to prove that God’s word is the message he speaks, takes a scroll on which God’s word has written and puts it in his mouth and eats it (Ezekiel 3).

I’m often afraid that the most ready comparison most of us here on Michigan Avenue have for prophecy is the person who stands on a street corner on top of a box or gripping a portable microphone and yells at you. Generally you wish that person were not there and would allow you to go on with your business. A few of these folks may have important things to say, but my guess is that, for the most part, if you think of them as prophets, they’re probably not making you want to dig deeper into the Bible.

Looking back at the Old Testament, two misconceptions come quickly to mind: The typical conservative assumption is that prophets were people who told the future, usually having something to do with Jesus. On the other hand, the typical liberal assumption is that prophets were speaking only about the present, about injustices of their own time, and they were interested in correcting the political and social wrongs of their world. There may be elements of truth in both of these ideas, but there are things lacking in them both as well. And I find these ideas to be misleading, because I have always been much more convinced by an idea that seems to take the best of both these ideas, and it’s an idea to which most of us can relate. To put it simply: prophets were people who knew how to use their imaginations. They could look at the world around them and name for other people the gap between things the way they are and things the way they’re supposed to be. The great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the culture around us” (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 3). In other words, if we want to live faithfully, when we look around the world at things that are not the way they are supposed to be, we have to be people who have the imagination to see things another way. Prophets, these people who know how to use their imagination, are a gift to us as people of faith; if we don’t listen to them, like Fern’s mother we might go to the family doctor and insist that there is something wrong with imagination and be blind to the signs of hope that may be right in front of us.

All of this brings me around to the title of my sermon tonight: “What Would Look Like if God Was in Charge?” I heard this question stated last week when Fourth Church hosted theologian N. T. Wright as a guest speaker. N. T. Wright speaks all over the world, and he talked about this question as a way he engages all different kinds of people in thinking about what it means to live faithful lives.

One of the challenges of this question is not to personalize it too much and lose the meaning in the process. I am not asking you to imagine, in some cartoonish sense, that God is watching over you, waiting for you to make mistakes, rewarding you when you are kind, punishing you when you are not. Notice I didn’t ask what you would look like if God was in charge; I asked what the world would look like. Try to bracket for a moment what you would do if God were watching, and just start by asking what you think God wants for the world. The object of the question doesn’t have to be as big as the world either: ask what something smaller would look like if God was in charge. What if God was in charge of your workplace, your neighborhood, your condo association? How would people treat one another? What kinds of things would they say? How would people get food and shelter? How would people find work and get paid? How would we distribute and use the things that we have? What would the world look like if God was in charge?

These were the kinds of questions prophets asked. And the prophets were remarkable, because not only did they ask the questions, but they could imagine the answers. They could see the difference between things as they are and things as God wants them to be, and they were able to name and describe that difference and to tell other people about it.

Listen to tonight’s scripture, in which the prophet Isaiah describes the world with God in charge:

No one will ever hear the sound of weeping or crying in [the world] again.
No more will babies live only a few days, or the old fail to live out their days. . . .
[People] won’t labor in vain, nor bear children to a world of horrors. . . .
Wolf and lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. . . .
[People] won’t hurt or destroy at any place on my holy mountain . . . says the Lord.
(Isaiah 65)

This is Isaiah’s vision.

The ability to look out into the world and do the work of a prophet, seeing things as they are and naming what they should be, this is an invaluable part of faithful living, for it is where change begins. In my earlier description of prophecy, I left out a better example many of us might use to describe a prophet who lived in more recent times, namely Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Listen how close Dr. King’s language sounds to the passage I just read from the prophet Isaiah:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
(Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream”)

This is prophecy. It is prophecy because it is the ability to look at the world around us and imagine the way it would be if God was in charge. It is an imaginative view of the world that is not limited by the magnitude of the challenge; it is not dismayed by the distance between here and there.

This level of faithfulness, this ability and willingness to imagine the world differently, is striking, but I fear something about it. I am afraid that, confronted with the incredible influence and power and reputation of people like Dr. King, we might think ourselves unable to do the same kind of work. We might surrender our own imaginations because we think we may not have the same potential as other prophets who have done great things.

Walter Brueggemann, the same Old Testament scholar who describes prophets as the ones who imagine alternative ways of thinking, speaks to this fear. The natural question, he says, is how alternative is the vision supposed to be? “Alternative to what? In what ways alternative? How radically alternative?” (Walter Brueggeman, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 3). These questions don’t have clear and easy answers, he says, but it’s our responsibility as a community of believers to struggle with these questions—it’s our responsibility as a church because this is the place where imagining the world in different ways should begin.

Keep in mind that, yes, Dr. King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but he formulated that kind of thinking when he was sitting at lunch counters, when he was marching in the streets, when he was preaching and serving in his very own congregation. This is supposed to be the place where prophetic imagination begins.

Earlier this week I heard a comparison to this kind of hopeful thinking, this struggling with “how alternative” our vision needs to be. I had the occasion to meet a man named Wayne Pacelle, who is the president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States. Most of us think about the Humane Society in terms of their work with dogs and cats, and certainly their advocacy for those animals is important. But one of the chief concerns of the Humane Society these days is talking to American people about where we get our food—namely our dependence on factory farming, an industry that has arisen in response to a culture that consumes much more meat than is necessary or healthy for any of us. In my meetings in Washington with the Humane Society this week, I learned about horrible conditions in which millions of farm animals live so that I can eat whatever I want: pigs that live most of their lives in stalls too small for them to sit down; cows that never see a single blade of grass and are moved around factories with front end loaders because they lack the strength to walk; chickens packed so tightly together that they don’t grow feathers.

It’s hard to argue that these conditions aren’t atrocious, but of course the most common objection to changing these practices seems to be, What else can we do? There are so many of us. How else will we eat? Isn’t this mass production process too big to change? In the midst of such objections, I was struck to find out that Wayne Pacelle is understandably outraged about these practices, but in the midst of his outrage, he understands that eating meat is a part of who we are and is something that probably will never change. Nevertheless, he has great hope in his work, because he can imagine a world where we can continue to get food we need and want and enjoy and do so in compassionate ways. He can see the possibility for a different way of living to emerge.

I’m inclined to believe Wayne Pacelle, because when he talks about hope for changing the way we eat, he looks at other things that have changed in his lifetime, things he once thought would remain forever just the way there were.

Do you remember how it felt in the 1980s when the Berlin Wall came down? Before it happened, Communism in Eastern Europe was a given; it was so accepted that we could not imagine life any other way. A few short years later, the Cold War was over; a movement began in which Communism fell not only in East Germany but throughout the region, and it began with conversations that led to the tearing down of one wall.

Less than a year ago, when protests began in Tunisia, most of you probably thought, as I did, that it was a small uprising, doomed to be crushed by the repressive Tunisian government in a matter of weeks. Look at them now: Tunisians have been voting for a new government in recent weeks, and their courage and determination has not only changed their own country, it has changed their entire region and has changed methods of political protest all the way around the world. People started that revolution armed with nothing but their cell phones—oh yes, and they also had their imagination.

The point is that prophecy and its power does not require you to be Martin Luther King Jr. or the prophet Isaiah. God calls all of us in big and small ways, with our speech but also with our action, to look around the world, see where things are not as they should be, and say or do something about it. It all starts with a simple and incredibly important question: What would the world look like if God was in charge? What would it look like in your neighborhood, in your home, in your friendships, in your family, with your spouse or your partner? What is the distance between the way things are and the way they should be? How can you name that distance, and then how can you go to where God is calling you to be?

Amen.